European Journal of American Culture - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2013

This article begins by situating Kurt Cobain’s Journals within the so-called crisis of white masculinity, which is deemed to characterize contemporary masculinities in North America. The article then identifies the central entry in the text as the one which all of the other entries either anticipate or reiterate to some degree. The autobiographic text is read, by way of a nuanced textual analysis of this particular entry, as an unconscious phantasy (as defined by Melanie Klein). That is, the article demonstrates how the writing in Journals seems to mimic the complex mental processes wherein meaning is generated; it demonstrates how the text stages and then attempts to mitigate an acute anxiety about the integrity and the consequences of a white, heterosexual, masculine identification.

This article draws upon primarily anthropological and philosophical sources: namely the work of Arnold van Gennep (1960) and Victor Turner (1969) on rites of passage (specifically the concept of liminality as a state of betwixt and between, which takes place after a stage of ritualized separation and before re-incorporation of the ritual subject back into the social order) and, most significantly, the work of Gilles Deleuze (2005b) on crisis and the cinema of the time-image, as well as his work with Felix Guatarri on becoming and deterritorialization (1988) in order to characterize Gus Van Sant’s film Last Days (2004) as a film of crisis and transition. Moreover, this article situates the film within the wider context of American independent cinema, which, this author argues, is not merely a cinema in crisis, but one that deals specifically with situations of liminality and metamorphosis. Although the film can be read on a number of levels, I suggest that a very fruitful approach is to view Last Days as a study of becoming enabled through liminality. Additionally, this article explores the kind of viewing experience a film such as Last Days enables (namely, as an art experience).

Here I present a reading of Paul Auster’s Ghosts, part of The New York Trilogy, attentive to theories of subjectivity (especially those informed by psychoanalysis). I also try to go beyond the notion of theory as a supplier of ‘critical tools’; in fact, my reading suggests that Ghosts is in harmony with and complementary to certain theoretical discourses; it belongs, then, to a category we can loosely call ‘theoretical fiction’. Central to my argument is the dialectics of ‘I’ and ‘other’ that determines subjective constitution.

The criticism of Jack London’s work has been dominated by a reliance upon ideas of the ‘real’, the ‘authentic’ and the ‘archetypal’. One of the figures in London’s work around which these ideas crystallize is that of the ‘wolf’. This article will examine the way the wolf is mobilized both in the criticism of Jack London’s work and in an example of the work: the novel White Fang (1906). This novel, though it has often been read as clearly delimiting and demarcating the realms of nature and culture, can be read conversely as unpicking the deceptive simplicity of such categories, as troubling essentialist notions of identity (human/animal, male/female, white/Indian) and as engaging with the complexity of the journey in which a ‘small animal … becomes human-sexual by crossing the infinite divide that separates life from humanity, the biological from the historical, “nature” from “culture” ’ (Althusser 1971: 206).

This article examines questions relating to the limits of representation in the work of US painter Dana Schutz (born 1976). Schutz, who gained popularity through her paintings of self-devouring characters, deals with bodies as circuits of creation and deconstruction. The representation of the ‘unfinished’ body in process not only echoes aspects of the artistic creation process in general, but also reflects on the paradoxical link between construction and deconstruction in the production of art. The deterritorialization of the categories in/out, here/there, up/down in her paintings therefore allows for a productive and thorough-going re-examination of the broader questions attending creation, agency and alienation as part of the aesthetic process.

NICK CULLATHER, THE HUNGRY WORLD: AMERICA’S COLD WAR BATTLE AGAINST POVERTY IN ASIA (2010) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 326 pp., ISBN: 978-0674050785 (hbk), £27.95

EZRAPOUND: THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS, BETSY ERKKILA (ED.). (2011) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 480 pp., 978-0521401395 (hbk), £74.00

EZRA POUND, ENDS AND BEGINNINGS, JOHN GERY AND WILLIAM PRATT (EDS) (2011) New York: AMS Press, 250pp., 978-0404655303 (pbk), £81.95

THE KNIGHT AND THE TROUBADOUR: DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD AND EZRA POUND, MARIE-NOËLLE LITTLE (ED.) (2011) Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 182pp., 978-91-85214-60-0 (pbk/PDF), Available as a free PDF at http://www.dhf.uu.se/publications/other-publications/the-knight-and-the-troubadour-%E2%80%93-dag-hammarskjold-and-ezra-pound/

EZRA POUND, ALEC MARSH (2011) London: Reaktion Books, 224 pp., 978-1861898623 (pbk), £10.95

EZRAPOUND IN CONTEXT, IRA NADEL (ED.) (2010) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 530pp., 978-0521515078 (hbk), £ 68

DRAFTS & FRAGMENTS FACSIMILE NOTEBOOKS, EZRA POUND (2011) New York: Glenn Horowitz, No ISBN (Boxed), $350.00

LE TESTAMENT: 1923 FACSIMILE EDITION, EZRA POUND GEORGE ANTHEIL (ED.) (2011) Emeryville: Second Evening Art Publishing, 270pp., 978-0-9728859- 8-0 (pbk), $220

SELECTED POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS, EZRA POUND (2010) London: Faber & Faber, 256pp., 978-0571239009 (pbk), £16.99O

ONE MUST NOT GO ALTOGETHER WITH THE TIDE: THE LETTERS OF EZRA POUND AND STANLEY NOTT, EZRA POUND AND STANLEY NOTT MIRANDA B. HICKMAN (ED.) (2011) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 432pp., 978-0773538160 (hbk), £40

EZRA POUND TO HIS PARENTS: LETTERS 1895–1929, EZRA POUND MARY DE RACH EWILTZ, A. DAVID MOODY AND JOANNA MOODY (EDS) (2010) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 776pp., 978-0199584390 (hbk), £39

W.B. YEATS, EZRA POUND AND THE POETRY OF PARADISE, SEAN PRYOR (2011) Farnham: Ashgate Press, 250 pp., 978-1409406600 (hbk), £55

I POETI DI SALA CAPIZUCCHI: THE POETS OF THE SALA CAPIZUCCHI, CATERINA RICCIARDI, JOHN GERY AND MASSIMO BACIGALUPO (EDS) (2011) New Orleans and Rimini: University of New Orleans Press/Raffaelli Editore, 192pp., 9781608010684 (pbk), 12.45